Is Updating a Few Thousand Readers Worth a Half Million Taxpayer Dollars?

Assessing alternate models for Canadian news media

Plenty has been written about the many difficulties faced by legacy news media operations. You might even recall reading about the troubled CBC and the Liberal government’s ill-fated Online News Act in these very pages. Traditional subscription and broadcast models are drying up, and on-line ad-based revenues are in sharp decline.

As I’m sure you can appreciate, I’m quite happy with the work that’s possible right here on the Substack platform. A look at some other (mostly) Canadian Substack journalism sites testifies to the possibilities for success. But other folks are testing different approaches.

As a case in point, I just happened across the Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF), an organization focused on publishing Canadian stories. I’m very picky when it comes to stuff I read, but I have to say the few articles I’ve seen so far are nicely researched and worth reading. The curated data resources they also provide are helpful.

But it’s the IJF’s business model that really caught my attention. IJF seems to maintain a very large staff. It’s clear that the $19,000 they earned from website subscriptions and merchandise sales in 2024 wouldn’t have gone very far towards meeting that payroll.

IJF accepts government money and they’re remarkably open about it. In fact, with admirable transparency, they prominently list each of the 21 sources of their $1.7 million in 2024 revenues - nearly all of which took the form of donations. IJF’s 2024 revenues rose from $1.04 million in 2023, and $614,000 in 2022.

Donations included $333,333 from a private Canadian charity called The Tiny Foundation and $200,000 from 3858278 Canada Foundation - a private charitable foundation operating as Inspirit Foundation. Supporting media organizations appears to be a major activity of both Tiny Foundation and Inspirit.

Nine other donations adding up to around $500,000 came from federal government agencies or organizations funded by the government. The programs included:

• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ($188,832)

• Canada Summer Jobs ($48,599)

• The Local Journalism Initiative ($45,000)

• The Labour Journalism Tax Credit ($33,146)

• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council ($30,000)

Publicly-funded organizations included:

• University of Toronto ($12,000)

• Data Sciences Institute ($110,000)

• Independent Media Arts Alliance ($19,000)

• Venture for Canada ($14,000)

• Mitacs ($199,000)

Mitacs is a Canadian non-profit whose mandate involves promoting innovation. At least I think that’s what they do. I’ve long suspected that the more expensive an organization’s website design, the harder it is to figure out exactly what they do.

In any case, in 2021, Mitacs received a five-year federal grant for $708 million to “fund work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities that provide on-the-job training, and provide businesses with support to develop talent…” It would seem that some of that money went to IJF.